Apr 08, 2026
3 min read
The relationship between capitalism and the Internet has evolved, and digital technologies, rather than overcoming capitalist disparities, have contributed to the strengthening of racial discrimination.What is even more dangerous is that the limits of capitalist exploitation have grown.
From Manchester to Barcelona... How to understand the Internet as a reflection of the power of capital?
In this long article, Ben Tarnoff, a professional writer in the field of technology and co-founder of Logic magazine, tries to explain to us the development of the relationship between capitalism and the Internet, and how digital technologies have contributed to the growing differences in capitalism and reinforce rather than overcome racism. What is more dangerous is that the limits of capitalism's practice are expanding. Because toit was limited to factories, all members of society became factory workers who contributed to the process of financial accumulation without receiving a share of the wealth earned by the owners of the enterprises. Despite this crisis, Tarnoff proposes practical and ambitious solutions to overcome the policies of technology companies that monitor us everywhere and finally turn us into digital data and balancebank.
Several principles have dominated our digital ideas for a long time, and I'm sure most of you are familiar with these principles: information should be accessible to everyone, anything that enables communication between people is important, government control of the Internet is not good, the Internet is a different world where the old rules do not apply, the Internet is a place where people's freedom and independence are important.
These opinions were never the subject of absolute consensus, but were always the subject of controversy to one degree or another.Governments have found many ways to assert their sovereignty over Internet geography.Early on with the rise of white supremacist websites - the neo-Nazi website Stormfront in 1996 - scientists realized that we should be aware that communication via the Internet can make the world worse.
However, these philosophies gained control over common sense, and the traditions from which these assumptions arose—technology—YouTube, Internet liberalism, and Californian ideology—still prevailed. But when viewed from the perspective of our public discourse on the Internet, the decade of the 1990s is much longer.
Then came Edward Snowden.In 2013, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the Internet runs a major spying machine to serve American security interests.This leads to some technological pessimism in public opinion.Finally came Trump.These media outlets exaggerated the role of Russian influence in the minds of voters through social media (the existence of which, no doubt, but their expansion occurred at a time of great confusion and surprise, as it shows - the great results of that election)."Conflict with Technology" (4) (Techlash).
As a result, journalists and politicians began to pay more attention to the Internet and the companies that control it.The issue of diversion remained a major response, but the issues increased, and it became a large number of problems that needed to be addressed.He also joined the debate, because the (lodic) idea has settled in reactionary minds that big platforms are silencing conservative voices and suppressing them, which has led to the transformation of a wide spectrum of right-wing figures into fierce critics of Silicon Valley.
The result of this change was net!This new sharp voice began to appear on the pages of the New York Times and Fox News and between state governors and Congress (that is, between the Right and the Left, Republicans and Democrats).After criticism confined to small circles of science, only manifesting itself except in opposition websites and magazines such as "The Baffler" and "Valleywag", these criticisms are common in every platform and language and they are repeated.It's sad to hear this chorus of independent activists turn art critics overnight, but nevertheless, the anti-art storm is a good thing in the end, because we can finally have a real conversation about the Internet.90 years are over and the old gods are dead!
So where is the new God?That's what makes the time we live in interesting. The old influential species have collapsed, but the choice has not yet been made.James Bridle sums it up: There is something wrong with the internet and the way we think about the internet, but we do not yet have the right and acceptable answer to the big question: Where does error come from?How do we fix it?
Two groups compete to provide these answers. They compete to present a new story about the Internet that explains the origins of the crisis we face and provides a road map to overcome it.Some talk about monopoly and the need to fight it, while others focus on privacy issues and the need to obtain user consent. He proposed the term "surveillance capitalism" to describe new types of surveillance and manipulation.
It is true that these types of analyzes differ greatly, but they share a broad understanding of capitalism as a useful system, even if it requires occasional intervention from the state to limit its excesses.These analyses, then, contribute to the consensus between capitalism and the market.If the anti-monopoly team believes that these markets can merge and collide, and then they should increase the amount of competition in them, supporters of the Zuboff vision believe that sometimes market players violate the terms of fair exchange, and then this should be prevented.But these two groups - as I said before - share two irrevocable convictions: the first is that capitalism is generally compatible with people's desire for dignity and the right to determine their future (or that can be done with modifications).Second, capitalism and the market are the same.What if both beliefs are false?This is the starting point for us to create a better story on the Internet!
Well, if capitalism isn't just the market, then what is?
Markets have existed since ancient times, but capitalism is a relatively recent phenomenon. The principles of the capitalist movement first appeared in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but did not reach their full stage until the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
But capitalism has made markets more important than ever.Historian Robert Brenner pointed out that the definition of capitalism is basically dependence on the market.Before capitalism, farmers traded and bartered, but they did not depend on markets to obtain the necessities of life. Instead, they grew their own food.In a capitalist society you only get your daily life through the market.You have no choice but to buy what you need to survive;To find the money to buy, you must sell your labor power for wages.
"Market dependence" serves an important function: to facilitate accumulation.Accumulation is the goal of any capitalist organization.To extract additional value from the total value you have.What makes capitalism unstable and unstable is not the market, but accumulation.Let's put the matter in a Marxist way: Capital is value in motion. Every time capital moves, it expands and grows.Capitalism, therefore, is a way of organizing human societies for the purpose of moving capital.
There are many ways to move capital.The main method for capitalists is to buy people's labor power, use it to produce new value in the form of commodities, and then extract the value by selling them and making a profit.After that, part of the return is reinvested in expanding the production process, so that the owner of the money can produce more goods at a lower cost of production, which allows him to compete more effectively with other producers of the same asset.
What I mentioned may seem very obvious, but capitalism is actually a special way of carrying out this process.If we think about other types of social organizations, we will find that the purpose of production was often to satisfy people's needs. He grew up a simple farmer, who fed him and his family.Sometimes the purpose of production was to make the rulers rich. In ancient Rome, slaves did the dirtiest work so that the men of the royal court could enjoy the colors of luxury and luxury.
What makes capitalism an unusual phenomenon is that production (and accumulation) does not aim at anything in particular, but only seeks to allow more production and more accumulation.This obsession gives capitalism a high degree of mobility and dynamism and gives it revolutionary power.There is no doubt that capitalism has dramatically changed human life and changed – and this is what concerns us – our mode of production.Capitalism has forced people to produce together, in increasingly complex groups and formations of work and employment.امرا قعد به عمل الوحده, قد بات امرا جماليا.
This dynamic is most evident in factories.The modern factory originally originated in 19th-century Manchester, where Friedrich Engels' father co-owned a cotton mill.This gave the young Engels the opportunity to observe the birth of the modern factory up close.purpose.They do something together.
In pre-capitalist Europe, a person or a group of people can produce a thing or a commodity in the full sense of the word.But the situation is different in the case of capitalist factories, because "the threads, cloth, and metal products that come out of the factories are the joint work of a large number of workers, each of whom plays a small part in the production of the commodity."But Engels tells us: "None of them can say: I made this or: this is my product!"
But here lies the paradox that governs capitalismNo worker has the right to claim credit for production, but factory owners claim sole ownership of everything their collective labor produces.Now according to the new model wealth is created through social participation, but according to the old model it is still the private property of the individual.
This contrast will appear even more stark if we look at the bigger picture and take the entire economy into consideration.Regardless of the number of workers needed to run the Manchester cotton mill, the number needed to run the factory had to be much larger: the machine builders, those responsible for providing power to the machines, the slaves who picked cotton in the American South to power the machines, etc.
In contrast, the pre-capitalist economy looks more like an archipelago, because it includes small groups of producers, each of whom works in isolation from the others, producing what they produce for personal use.The network of capital concentrates masses of people at the main point of production, and connects them by innumerable threads of interdependence. But the wealth produced by this network is not distributed among the many workers who all contribute to production, but among the few who have this network: the owners of capital.
Before capitalism, when production was carried out on a small scale and limited to an individual or a group, this ownership system made sense.If the economy is a group of isolated islands, each island must own what it produces.But capitalism, with the revolution in production it brought, introduced a major paradox into the equation: wealth is now produced according to a network model, but it is still owned according to an archipelago model.Bosses like Engels' father became rich, while Manchester workers in poor areas ravaged by cholera were barely paid enough to meet their basic needs!
What does this have to do with the Internet?
The internet, and the group of technologies we call “technologies” in general, makes a huge difference in the fact that wealth is created by the collective and then by the individual.Technology multiplies the impact of the Manchester Model exponentially, as it enhances the collective process of wealth production in an unprecedented way, and increases the accumulation of new financial resources, but ultimately wealth remains in the hands of its owners, as was the case in Engels' time.
I said that a worker in a Manchester cotton mill could not hold a ball of thread and say, "I made it," this little ball of thread was made by several thousand workers (and slaves).As for technological wealth, on the other hand, it is the result of the contributions of billions of living and dead people!
That is why the technology sector has extremely high profit margins.Take Facebook for example.Facebook reported net income of $22 billion in 2018, with an operating margin of 45%.The company has 40,000 full-time employees and works with an undisclosed number of outside contractors; this means its production costs are virtually zero compared to the profits it makes!
Then again, Facebook's power doesn't just come from money. These leading media systems embody what Frank Pascual calls "active royalty". They act as a government (the most obvious example being Libra, Facebook's global digital currency), and that government is an authoritarian government in which Mark Zuckerberg holds a stake to ensure he controls and controls the company.
It's hard to imagine a more controversial form of the Manchester model than one billionaire running a social network with over two billion people.The network of capital became concentrated in the hands of the few in a much more concentrated way than Engels imagined.
Saying that Facebook only has a small number of employees does not mean that the work done by those employees is of little importance.Content managers, data center engineers, site engineers, and other employees are the ones who run the company and keep it running.But their collective work, like Engels' father's factory workers, ultimately depends on many circles of collective action outside of Facebook, and in the case of Facebook or other tech companies, on these external factors.The value of resource contribution is very large and broad
These resources include workers who develop software and hardware, develop protocols, and program languages that form the foundation on which the tech industry is built.These small industries have grown over the decades since the invention of the first modern electronic computers in the 1940s, and they rely heavily – collectively – on supporting the US military.Another source is the workers who perform the primary production activities from which all profits are derived.and classification of training data for machine learning models.
Despite the diversity of these skills, they seem traditional because their owners do their jobs for a known salary, whether it's inventing Internet protocols or cutting fiber optic cables. If we go back to Facebook, we see that the company's value is determined by the nearly two billion users who post, comment, and like the page.Then this content, in addition to the activity of all users of the site, is what gives Facebook the personal data it uses to sell targeted advertising, meaning that we, the users, represent the majority of the profit participants.
It is impossible to verify theoretically whether “posting” and “clicking” on Facebook are actually “work,” and if it is work, what kind of work it is.In her article on the subject, theorist Tiziana Terranova uses the term “freelancer” to describe the various unpaid activities that supported and facilitated money-making in the early days of the commercial Internet, starting with voluntary work.by AOL developers (known as America Online) for developers who create open source software.But the scope of these activities has increased significantly since the year 2000, when Terranova published his article, and they have become different from what we are used to with the word “work”.Over time, technology has become capable of extracting value from us by being present in the world and using it!
A good example of this is a cafe called Brainwash in San Francisco.Until it closed, this cafe had a camera that constantly took photos of customers.After the cafe closed, some researchers obtained this footage and used the data to develop machine learning models for head and facial recognition programs.In 2016, Megvii, a Chinese company that pioneered facial recognition software, used this data to develop its software.As we know, the “Megvi” company is involved in totalitarian surveillance activities carried out by the Chinese Communist Party state in Xinjiang Province [with a Uyghur-Muslim majority] in the west of the country.So imagine that by visiting a coffee shop in San Francisco, you could help a tech company make more profits by selling products to the Chinese government that help them oppress millions of citizens 6,000 miles away.(Migvi is now worth $4 billion, and when this stock hits the market, the company expects to add another $1 billion in value.)
Such a complex and complex value chain will become more common in the coming years. As computer networks enter our homes, shops, streets and workplaces, they generate more data.Meanwhile, the learning capabilities of computers are increasing at an ever-increasing rate, and their ability to process data found on the Internet is expanding to benefit a variety of systems, starting with facial recognition and ending with predicting consumer preferences when making purchases.
The result is a world where the production of wealth is more collective than before.In the nineteenth century, Engels discussed how capitalism changed the mode of production "from a series of individuals to a series of social actions".The entry of the whole world into the framework of computing means that the scope of this social activity has become the whole society.The factory came close to what Terranova and others call, based on a term from the Italian autonomous movement (5), a "social factory," and the new Manchester became ubiquitous.
Capitalism binds us to each other and in the relentless pressure against capitalism brings people into new positions and circles to create collective wealth.But capitalism is not only a machine for building relationships, it is also a machine for creating divisions. Capitalism creates inequality and difference in the same process as it creates wealth.
Let us return again to the case of Manchester and consider the mechanism of creating differences.The people who have accumulated the wealth of this city are not a homogeneous mass. On the contrary, they are divided into men and women, English and Irish, white and black.These differences were constantly reinforced because they served a valuable purpose: they contributed to legitimizing exploitation and representing it as natural.
Therefore, it is natural for the Irish to earn less than the English and live in poorer areas.It is also natural for women to earn less than men, and at the same time they have to raise children without a salary (these children go to work in factories at the age of five!).Similarly, it is natural and legal to enslave Africans and take them to collect cotton for the mills, and after destroying the cotton fields, it is natural and legal.It is natural to rob the land of the natives who live there!
Capitalism did not invent the differences between people. People are different in their shapes, languages, societies and cultures, but capitalism has made these differences have a significant impact on people's lives.It turned difference into inequality, and differences affected a person's ability and worth (and even determined whether they were considered human at all!).
Political scientist Cedric J. Robinson argues that capitalism has been characterized from the beginning by producing differences (hence its nickname "racial capitalism").According to Robinson, feudal Europe was racist.Therefore, when Europeans invaded and colonized each other, they came up with racist ideas to justify enslaving, for example, Slavic peoples.(In fact, the widespread enslavement of slaves in the Middle Ages is what brought the word "slave" into English and other European languages.)
If racist ideas are prevalent in a society where capitalism appears, the role of capitalism is to take these concepts and expand them to their maximum limits.Capitalism developed and deepened the idea of racial differences to justify the new relations of exploitation and submission required for the accumulation of production (especially after Europeans began to invade Asia, Africa, and the Americas).Robinson said, "The tendency of European civilization and capitalism is not towards increasing homogeneity, but rather towards strengthening differences, and turning regional, cultural and dialectal differences into racial, ethnic differences."
Robinson's ideas help us illuminate another important aspect of how technology works. We said that technology exacerbates the contradiction between capitalism's collective accumulation of wealth and its individual appropriation, and now we say that it exacerbates capitalism's tendency to divide human beings into separate groups, each with their own values and capabilities. These two roles of technology are intertwined. Theorist Jodi Melamed says, “Capital through accumulationExcept not really capital.""Capital can only be accumulated through the production and flow of deeply unequal relations between groups of men," he says.In other words: the network of wealth creation depends on the machine that makes this difference.
Over time, differences arose automatically, software-wise and at the level of algorithms, as the data digitized by the machine flows into the algorithm that the machine can learn, and the latter finds patterns in the data, which gives power to tools to categorize people and divide each into different groups.
Back in 1993, media expert Oscar H.Gandhi Jr. foresaw what would happen and gave us a precise vision of this working mechanism, which he called the "panoptic sorting", in his book of the same title."It's a technology that makes distinctions that identify possibilities and opportunities based on indicators and the management models that feed them."
Gandhi saw how governments and corporations collected and processed personal information at a time when computers were still very primitive compared to today (and of course, online commerce did not yet exist).However, Gandhi recognized the logic established today: data comes from many sources for the purpose of classifying people "based on their estimated political and economic value."This process, in Gandhi's opinion, is not something incidental or marginal to capitalism, but an integral part of it, since the classifier with a comprehensive vision is "the all-encompassing eye of the difference-producing machine that drives the world capitalist system."
Today, this all-seeing eye can see much more than before, and the risk of classification is much greater than before.The sorting algorithms help determine who deserves a bank loan and who doesn't, who deserves a job and who deserves jail time.In addition, Gandy pointed out that the comprehensive inspection classification exacerbates existing inequalities, whether racial or otherwise.Today, with the development of self-learning systems, this is truer than it was yesterday.
In recent years, a large number of researchers and journalists have tried to draw attention to the problem of "algorithmic bias".This bias is chronic and exists in self-learning systems because they simply "learn" through data from the real social world (data that necessarily reflects centuries of difference and inequality created by capitalism).Then the "predictive policing" algorithms learn from data that shows them that the police have arrested a lot of black people, which leads them to expect to arrest more black people.This is also the case with Amazon's algorithms trained on the resumes of mostly male workers, favoring men over women in employment opportunities.
The role of these systems is not only to produce inequality, but also to correct it.Capital and its machine that produces difference has always required quite a bit of ideological work to maintain that difference.For centuries, philosophers, priests, scientists, and governments had to always say that this or that type of people were inferior to others, and always reiterate the fact that robbing these people of their lands or suppressing their freedom was legal and appropriate, and that controlling their bodies and exploiting their labor was part of their personhood.These ideas are not born or spread on their own. Instead, there must be actors who deliberately spread space and time across generations and continents. These ideas must be based on laws and practices, taught in schools and churches, and implemented in homes and on the streets.
All this takes time and effort, but the automatic self-learning system can speed up the work.If the computer says that black men are more likely to commit crimes, or that women are not good software engineers, it must be true.This is what right-wing commentators say in another form: Algorithms are just mathematics, and mathematics cannot be racist!Therefore, the independent education system not only automates the production of difference and inequality, but also automates racism.
Every moving body has a proper way of moving. A fish needs water to move, and a car needs a smelly way.Since capital is a moving asset, it must be in constant motion.Capital is very interested in moving into a unique personal clothing style;A garment that is tied and untied, tied and cut, twisted and torn at the same time.
It helps us understand what we call "technology."Technology is a tool and enabler of the changes in "social relations," to borrow Melamed's phrase.He explained his desire to create great inequality in wealth and power, and to support the hierarchical organization of people based on race, gender, and other divisions.
For our analysis to be useful, it should not be limited to a descriptive aspect, but should have a compelling element.That is, it must provide some kind of answer to the question: What is to be done?
As usual, things get a little murkier at this point.But one point remains clear enough.If technology exacerbates the existing contradiction between wealth accumulated by the many and owned by the few, then the obvious solution must be to resolve this contradiction: wealth must be collectively produced and jointly owned, or, as Marx and Engels said in the Communist Manifesto, the solution is to transform the "collective product" of capital into "the common property of every member of society."
The idea is quite simple: If the social network creates wealth, why didn't the social network use the wealth?But the big question is: How do you do this exactly?What does it mean to change the country's wealth into a country's property?You know this issue is the most ink spilled issue in the history of all leftist debates.The socialist solution tested in the 20th century was a complete country under the Soviet system, but this solution did not last long.
Another perspective - which is starting to become popular - comes from the tradition of self-organizing workers.This tradition has many versions, the most famous and heroic may be the experience that happened in the revolutionary region of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War, when people took over factories, farms and even flower shops and, for a short time, managed everything by themselves.Later, the young Marxist Louis Orr would remember wandering the anarchist streets of Barcelona at that time.He felt great joy, and how cafes, restaurants, hotels, and cinemas lit red or red and black lights, and there were banners on the doors saying "It has been confiscated" or "It has become public for all."
The Barcelona model and its repercussions is one of the possible alternatives to the Manchester model.But what does adopting self-management in technology mean?Here are some practices that provide the raw materials to create an answer.There are small, collectively owned platforms for everything from ride-hailing companies to companies that run social media networks. There are also internet networks that span specific municipal boundaries and are managed by the local community. There are also some ambitious ideas to democratize large platforms by turning them into some kind of cooperative or making their data available to users - although their implementation is not clear in the near term.
These projects and proposals may be a tangible reality. They seem to have enormous value as practical hypotheses, but they are necessarily conditional and incomplete, especially when considered as a possible direction out of capitalism.Under capitalism, cooperatives often behave like ordinary enterprises because they are all subject to the same market demands.Therefore, there is no straight line connecting the experience of self-management and the broader goal of breaking with the logic of endless accumulation and rebuilding society on a radically different basis.
There is no direct connection between the democratization of property and the fight against the various forms of oppression inherent in capitalist mechanisms of creating difference. For example, co-operative platforms will not end algorithmic racism.This leads to another important point: sometimes the most liberal option is not to transfer ownership of deep infrastructure and change the way it is managed, but rather to dismantle it and completely eliminate it.
Take Stop LAPD Spying, a coalition that has been organizing against police surveillance in Los Angeles for years.The coalition has successfully pushed police departments to abandon two types of predictive policing programs (programs that lead to police violence against working-class communities of color).Instead, insist on blocking them altogether.They do not call for the democratization of digital police ownership, but rather its complete elimination.
Therefore, in this example, one organization challenged the tendency of technology to multiply capitalist differences and worked to abolish the use of technology.Similar approaches can be found in the growing protest movement against facial recognition software, where some cities have even banned public bodies from using the software.These and similar campaigns are based on the belief that some technologies are too dangerous and should not be tolerated.He believes that one solution to dealing with what Gandhi called “total classification” is to first destroy the tool that makes this classification possible.
We may call this option the Luddite option (6), and there is no doubt that this option will be an essential component of any democratic future.Historian David F.Noble once wrote about the need to think about technology in the present [not the future].Instead, they saw what technology was doing to them today and took steps to prevent it.These people were not enemies of technology itself, but rather against the restrictive relations that certain technologies imposed.To eradicate these relationships these technologies had to be dismantled and new alternative relationships built from the bottom up had to be attempted.
Sometimes breaking a machine is a good idea;but there are other ideas and other movements.Tech workers have taken collective action against the US Department of Defense (Pentagon) and against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.Freelancers have joined platforms like Uber to demand better wages, benefits and working conditions.In these movements we can find some useful material that reveals the characteristics of a new society.The organization can be based on different foundations
The intellectual is not the only one who thinks; think also of the moving masses of people.It is true that this process is chaotic and convoluted, it is true that it is full of dead ends and misleading entrances, and it is true that it takes a lot of time to move conflicts to new places without solving them once and for all, but this is the only way to stop the movement of capital in the future and allow new aspects - the needs of people - and the organization of our common planet.This is how the left answers the question of what to do about technology and everything: thinking together, thinking on the move, walking on rough terrain!
- The belief that technological development will lead us to a better place.
- The belief that the spread of the Internet will lead to a reduction in government restrictions on human rights.
- This is the title of an article written by the left-wing technology theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, in which they say that the growth of technology companies in Silicon Valley in the 1990s led to the rise of neoliberalism, which allows the individual a much wider margin of freedom to confront the state, and that the end result of this technological right-wing activity is between the left and creativity.All the traditions mentioned by the author became popular in the 1990s.
The phenomenon of conflict with technology refers to growing hostility towards technology companies and skepticism about the impact of technological advances (5G, Big Data, etc.).
It is a Marxist movement that emerged in the 1960s from a workers' position and presented the theoretical and practical achievements of classical Marxism. Its most outstanding theoreticians include Antonio Negri (translator).
- When the introduction of machines to the woolen mill threatened the jobs of many unskilled workers. So more teams were created who promised to secretly destroy the new industrial machines. They were known as the Luddites, named after Ned Ludd, who had previously destroyed two textile machines.
This article was translated by Logic and does not represent Meydan's site.
